Book Bites: Seriously… I’m Kidding, by Ellen DeGeneres

One fine morning in sunny California, a couple of years ago, Ellen DeGeneres finally got to take a good, long, steamy dump. She’d been having trouble with the matter for some time, emitting only miserly, Malteser-sized stools for longer than a week, despite eating bananas by the pound and consulting daily with her physician (who prescribed laxatives), her therapist (who recommended rest), and her wife (who just tossed her locks and cackled in Ellen’s face).

Finally, it looked like the bananas had worked, and Ellen was able to enjoy what she felt must have been her best relieving yet. She was so happy with the result, and so proud of her achievement, that she immediately sent a sample to her publisher, who promptly had it transformed into 250-odd pages of text.

And that’s how Ellen DeGeneres’ third book, Seriously… I’m Kidding, came into being. By the time I got to the end of the approximately 3 hour audio version (read by the charming Ms. DeGeneres herself), I was fighting off a splitting headache and a weird sensation of having been removed from reality. Ms. DeGeneres’ book reads like the inside of Scarecrow’s brain (funny thing, to think of Ms. DeGeneres as a 50-year old bimbo, and I don’t mean that offensively at all, it’s actually rather endearing) – a jumble of popular culture references disguised as thoughts, sprinkled with the banal posing as humour. Her book tells nothing new, funny, or wise. Its only redemption is that it claims (as per the title) to be one bombastic joke.

And yet, and yet. At the end of the bumbling, bimbo babble, Ms. DeGeneres is still as loveable as ever. She may not be particularly brainy or insightful, but you can see that she’s a kind, loving, caring, fun-loving, hard-working person at heart, and I suppose that’s all that she needs to be. And if she wants to write books, well, we don’t have to read them, do we? For my part, I’ll just stick to watching her show from now on.